It is possible to file a trademark application in Korean in foreign countries (News letter No, 292)

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KH

Post Date

2014-07-16

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1. It is possible to file a trademark application in Korean in foreign countries

- It is possible to search, in Korean, the names of goods acknowledged in the world’s 19 patent offices.

According to the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the Korean website (http://www.wipo.int/mgs/?lang+kr) of the Madrid Goods and Services (MGS) has been opened since June 2014 as a result of the cooperation for over 1 year with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This will significantly increase the convenience of the applicants of trademark applications to be filed in foreign countries opened.

When companies filed Madrid international trademark applications or directly file trademark applications in foreign countries, the goods to be protected by the trademarks were required to be translated in the foreign countries’ languages. In this regard, errors occurred in the names of goods due to the problems in translation and the differences in legal systems of the countries and therefore the registrations of the trademarks were often rejected.

However, in the Korean MGS, if an applicant enters, in Korean, the names of goods to be protected in filing a Madrid international trademark application, the English translation thereof is possible and it is indicated whether or not to be recognized by the world’s 19 patent offices in Austria, China, Japan, US, etc. including WIPO. Further, since the Korean MGS provides the function of translating Korean into 16 languages including not only English but also Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, etc., it is expected to be of great help to the applicants who want to file directly in these particular countries.

2. Opening of a new electronic filing system to improve safety and convenience

KIPO opened a new electronic filing system on June 16, 2014, to support that people’s ideas can be safely and easily made as intellectual property rights.

Through this new electronic filing system, it is possible to file patent applications in diverse web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, etc. In addition, the safety and convenience of the electronic filing system has been greatly strengthened to easily make complicated patent-related formats.

The development of the new electronic filing system was carried forward to improve user’s conveniences and to accept the demands for improvement of the electronic filing system which could be used only in the Internet Explorer as different web browsers (Chrome, Safari, etc.) have appeared.

To provide people with services in diverse web browsers, the new electronic filing system has followed the web standards and applied the technology replacing the Active-X pointed as the object to distribute malice codes. It has also applied the PDF technology so that users can directly and easily make the patent-related formats on screen.

3. The number of patent applications for the advertising technology for smart TVs has been increasing

The advertising technology for smart TVs recently filed in patent applications has developed in the types of: - providing, at the proper time, the advertising information which viewers desire through communications between the advertise-providing servers and viewers passing the conventional advertising paradigms, and - providing differentiated and customized advertisements for viewers by considering the viewers’ tastes by the servers.

Further, the applications have been filed for the following types of: - providing advertising information of broadcasting programs by connecting a smart TV and a viewer’s smart phone, and - advertising used for shopping after extracting or storing advertised contents inserted in the broadcasting contents.

Especially, among the viewer-customized advertise types, there have been filed technology of providing the viewer’s desired advertisements by collecting and analyzing the viewer’s behavior patterns in cloud environments or by identifying the viewer through the camera installed to the TV and then analyzing the viewer’s tastes.

Thanks to the smart advertising technology, viewers are expected to be selectively served only the advertisements in the fields of interest. Viewers are also expected to immediately receive the advertising information for products that they are interested in, for example, some celebrities’ apparels, during watching programs, such as soap dramas, not during the regular advertisement broadcasting.

According to KIPO, the number of the relevant applications increased from 23 in 2009 to 37 in 2013. By technical field, the proportion of the relevant applications is highest in the field of the technology providing the advertising information through the communications between the server and viewer.